As Pandora found when she was messing around with her box, sometimes you start things, they gain momentum and then woosh, they are beyond your control!
My Pandora’s box moment came after reading The Four Hour Work Week (affiliate link).
Now, many people better qualified than me can tell you about the ins-and-outs of the book, talk you through the more subtle points. Instead, what has stayed with me from the book, what I was amazed by, was how ready it was to take on the assumptions that underlie how we approach work today, and how easily it was able to show many of them to be outdated and irrelevant.
It is this challenging and questioning approach that has infected my thinking. This is the ‘Pandora-process’ that I can’t seen to control or stop. And I’m pleased about it.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
What’s wrong with earning a living?
Earning a living. Simple enough phrase really. 99.9% of the world’s working population go to work everyday and ‘earn a living’. But take a second to think about what the words really mean: Earn. A. Living.
What does the phrase say? More importantly, what is the underlying assumption it makes about work and life? If you think about it, you can see that the phrase implies that you have ‘do’ one thing (earn), in order to ‘have’ another (living). It implies that you have to work, before you are allowed to thrive; that you have to ‘earn’ before you can ‘live’.
Even if it is just a figure a speech (and even if it is, we mustn’t forget that the way we talk about things dramatically impacts our approach to them) I don’t like this assumption that we have to ‘earn a living’, for a number of reasons. Most of my reasons are focused on what it seems to imply about the deferring of one’s life to a later date in lieu of earning now. Life is NOW, not in the future, at some unspecified date. But I won’t go into that now. For the moment I’ll just ask:
What about earning WHILE living instead?
What about you?
Have you experienced a change to your thinking or approach to life?
What spurred that change?
What examples do you have of flawed thinking and bogus assumptions in our everyday approach to work and life?
Tim,
Interesting post, since I’ve never stopped to think about that phrase. Great point made and shared.
Ever since I started working, I and a co-worker would chat (at least weekly) about how earning a living is really backwards–work your butt off, hope to get 2-3 weeks of vacation a year….. pretty depressing if you ask me :O
Moon, I agree, working so hard to be ‘rewarded’ with 2-3 weeks vacation seems all backwards. Surely part of the answer is to change the nature of our work so that it resembles vacation time more closely?
Tim, maybe, but I think there’s more to it than that. It is standard to work from 8-4:30 for me, and usually longer for other people. I honestly think hours need to be cut back and weekends longer. I have to leave the cleaning until I find some time over the weekend, I try to cook dinners at home, but whew, is it a struggle after work, and exercising?
No wonder us Americans are so unhealthy.